Moved by Myth is an embodied response to Raja Ravi Varma’s mythological vignettes through the aesthetics of Odissi, choreographed and performed by Rohini Banerjee and accompanied by musicians Taishi Nandy on vocals and Swarup Mukherjee on the flute. 

Presented as part of TRI’s spring season exhibition Khadi, a Canvas, curated by Lavina Baldota in collaboration with the Abheraj Baldota Foundation, the performance brings Banerjee’s movement practice from the stage into the TRI galleries. There, she engages directly with Raja Ravi Varma’s iconic chromolithographs, translating his evocation of divinity from the printed frame into embodied form through the gestures, shapes, expressions, and body percussions of Odissi. 

The performance is animated not only by movement but by sound. With Taishi Nandy on vocals and Swarup Mukherjee on the flute, the work moves across mediums, from the spatial to the sonic, weaving a new aesthetic interpretation of Varma’s iconography that resonates with Gaurang Shah’s khadi saris on display throughout the galleries. 

Defining a Pose is an immersive evening of performance and demonstration centred on the underground dance form of Waacking, led by performer, artist, and actor Mekhola Bose, accompanied by Dalia Chowdhury and Solanki Rahaman, within the First Floor Gallery of TRI’s heritage building. 

The evening moves through Waacking’s roots, a dance style born in the underground punking scene of 1970s Los Angeles, shaped by Black, Hispanic, and LGBTQIA+ communities who transformed the disco floor into a space of joyful defiance and radical self-expression. Through sharp arm movements, dramatic poses, and an intimate dialogue with music, Waacking comes to TRI not as a performance to be watched, but as a history to be felt. 

Structured as a fluid sequence of staged vignettes and guided demonstrations, Defining a Pose moves between choreography and conversation, drawing participants into the work through call-and-response exercises that extend the movement vocabulary of Waacking into the room. Held in dialogue with ADDA: The Third Space, TRI’s winter season exhibition by St+art India Foundation, the evening offers every visitor, whether they step forward to move or choose to witness, an encounter with a dance tradition that has always insisted on the right to be seen. 

If space is shaped by form and time, then the body plays an active role in determining what it inhabits by the sheer act of inhabitance. In her work as a performer, choreographer, writer, publisher, and social strategist, Mallika Sarabhai examines this relationship between movement and environment, often fusing the classical and the contemporary to forge new forms that redefine space by time and suggest new possibilities for the collective’s inhabitation of the present.

One such piece is Past Forward, a contemporary Bharatanatyam performance serving as the finale of Leap!: Pickle Factory Season 4. As a precursor to Pickle Factory’s Kolkata presentation of this original choreography, Mallika Sarabhai sits down with Sumona Chakrabory, Founder Director of Hamdatsi and Deputy Director of Delhi Art Gallery, and Madeleine St. John, Director of TRI and Dance Movement Therapy + Expressive Arts practitioner, to discuss what we can learn from the female body and properties of femininity about choreographing change within space and time to develop a more balanced body politic.

Places have a pulse, and their inhabitants — as well as their transients — participate in the collaborative composition of environmental melodies through the vibrations of habitation as much as migration. In their sonic research practice, the artists of LTK4 & Associates, an ensemble from Cologne, deploy melody, harmony, rhythm, and resonance to create novel soundscapes that examine the relationships between land and life.

For this inaugural installation of Surround Sounds, TRI welcomes LTK4 & Associates to Kolkata for a collaborative presentation with two Kolkata-based music artists. Forming a transient quartet for just one night, the artists and their instruments converge within Sea of Fists, Prabhakar Pachpute’s solo immersive exhibition, to respond to the city of Kolkata through an improvised performance that asks and answers questions of inhabitance through music.

In dialogue with the exhibition Bhuri Bai – My Life as an Artist, Storied Signatures explores how art becomes a record of the self, where gestures, images, and stories converge to shape identity. Bhuri Bai’s vivid works draw from a tribal visual language to portray contemporary life, inviting us to ask: what in our lives and of ourselves bears recording?

Guided by expressive arts practitioner Charvi Budhdeo, this multidisciplinary workshop turns those questions inward through creative movement and illustration. Participants will first explore their personal narratives through guided movement exercises, then translate those explorations into the language of mark-making, using the act of signing as a tool of storytelling.

As the session unfolds, the line between body and image blurs: a signature becomes choreography, a trace of expression and authorship. The workshop culminates in the creation of a personal “visual ledger”, a small illustrated record that captures the essence of your story in a single gesture.

This participatory session invites audiences to discover how self-expression can become both an archive and an act of renewal.

As much as the body is a vessel for experiencing the world around us and expressing ourselves in it, the body is also a repository — a somatic data bank that stores the information and impressions of these life experiences and expressions. What, then, is capacious enough to record the body itself in its literal and cultural range of motion? And how can this record serve as a platform for imagining new embodied expressions and articulations?

With these questions in mind, Attakalari Centre for Movement Arts in Bangalore has embarked on their project-turned-platform NAGARIKA, created in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Bangalore — an easily accessible and interactive online transformation system on Indian somatic traditions and contemporary expressions.

As the first initiative of its kind in India, NAGARIKA aims to bridge the span between traditional physical wisdom and technological innovation in order to support the development of contemporary arts in India. As part of NAGARIKA’s digital debut, TRI Art & Culture welcomes Jayachandran Palazhy, Founder and Artistic Director of Attakalari, for a presentation on the research involved in developing NAGARIKA, followed by a conversation with Vikram Iyengar, dancer, choreographer, curator, and Director of Pickle Factory Dance Foundation. Together, they explore the importance and impact of archiving nonverbal articulations of tradition toward encouraging the emergence of contemporary expressions. Set against the backdrop of TRI’s exhibitions on living traditions, this installation of TRI Talks extends our conversations on the relationship between art in the archive and art as the archive — this time through the lens of somatics.

If everything is energy, then vibration is our most raw of materials. This is the foundation of Amit Chaudhuri’s elucidations in the novelist and vocalist’s 2021 book, Finding the Raga. After sharing his quest to make sense of Hindustani classical music with the West and other parts of India, Amit Chaudhuri brings his research on the raga back to Kolkata.

Joined by Hiranmay Mitra on harmonium, Ashoke Mukherjee on tabla, and Dabbu on guitar, Amit Chaudhuri will guide audiences through the improvisatory process of the performed alap, showcasing the raga as a tool of resonance rather than representation — as a creative framework that becomes expressive form.

An extension of the preceding program, Mortar & Memory, this lecture performance examines the architecture of sound to investigate site specificity as the origin of all creative vibration.

Never Stop – A Music That Resists is a deep dive into the origins of the African-American pioneers of techno music. The movement we know today as Detroit techno follows a long history of creativity and freedom used by musicians to escape the harsh realities of life. Creative forces and new ways of thinking oriented toward the worlds of technology and electronic communication created a new movement for music that is as fascinating as it is inspiring.

Featuring stories of Juan Atkins, Derrick May, Carl Craig, and Jeff Mills, the documentary takes the audience through these biographical journeys and showcases how independent record labels gave rise to a counterculture that had global reverberations.

Jacqueline Caux is an independent filmmaker, documentary producer, and writer. She has published several interviews with unconventional artists from the late 1900s and has been involved in organising several contemporary music festivals. She lives and works in Paris.

If I Think of Germany at Night offers a portrait of five pioneers of electronic music for whom work is their raison d’etre. While documenting the personal narratives of Ricardo Villalobos, Sonja Moonear, Ata, Move D, and Roman Flügel, this documentary examines the club music and club culture that defines the techno genre including its sociological and philosophical reverberations. 

Romuald Karmakar is a Berlin-based filmmaker whose works have received international acclaim across major film festivals. He works in both feature and documentary films. He represented Germany at the 55th Art Biennale in Venice in 2013 and is currently a member of Akademie der Künste Berlin.

Sisters with Transistors narrates the remarkable yet untold stories of the female pioneers of electronic music, women whose work gave definition to techno as a genre and determined how we listen to techno music today. This documentary is an invitation to explore the stories of these women and learn how their perspectives, informed by academia, outsider art, and commercial media, have been the building blocks of an international movement in music.

Lisa Rovner is a London-based artist and filmmaker. Her creative projects, from short films and music videos to art exhibitions, are all connected by her fascination for archives and sounds, which allow her to transform politics and philosophies into cinema.